“We’re going to have dinner and see if we can break bread and make sense out of this,” Roush said last month.

Team owner Roger Penske said he would keep his engine shop, which is housed in Concord, N.C., and not at the team headquarters in Mooresville.

Penske hasn’t ruled out building Dodge engines to sell to other teams if he ends up not building Ford motors himself. Dodge is expected to court other teams to race its cars after the departure of Penske.

“We're going to keep our engine shop open obviously,” Penske told reporters last month at the IndyCar Series opener in Florida. “We have a big investment there. We’re certainly not going to shut the door.

“There's a lot of speculation, but I can assure you that engine shop will continue to operate in some mode one way or the other. … I think we bring a lot to the party.”

Ford could prohibit Penske from building Dodge engines, but Dodge would be obligated to sell the basic engine block pieces to Penske if the organization wants to continue to build Dodge motors.

“We haven’t made a decision,” Penske said. “We have a lot of people calling us wanting to run Dodges. … If Dodge is interested, if we would go to a separate source, then our shop could be available to do Dodge work, for sure.”

Roush Yates is the only Ford-supported supplier of Ford engines and most Ford teams use Roush Yates engines.

It is not unusual for race team owners to be aligned with different car companies outside of racing, but it’s considered taboo within the racing industry.

While Roush has been aligned with Ford on the racing side, he has thousands of employees who do work for Chrysler and General Motors out of Roush Industries in Michigan. Penske is aligned with Chevrolet in IndyCar and has relationships with several manufacturers as part of his automobile and transportation businesses.

On the racetrack, however, Roush has remained loyal to Ford throughout his NASCAR career while Penske has switched manufacturers several times since he entered the sport in 1972.

“This is his third time with Ford—he’s changed his spots and we certainly wish him well and will try to help him and be helped by him when it serves a common purpose,” Roush said.

Roush said that building cars and engines for multiple organizations—he leases and sells cars to Richard Petty Motorsports and Front Row Motorsports in addition to leasing engines through Roush Yates—is the only way to have a viable business model.

Engineering and hardware development costs are too high for Roush to pay for with only sponsorship for his racecars, he said. So the Penske move—Penske was the only Dodge-backed organization—makes sense.

“I cannot race with two or three cars—I couldn’t get enough money,” Roush said. “I can’t speak knowingly about his business, but I can’t imagine that he’s had a viable business in terms of generating income through sponsorships and selling parts that he’s required to do all that engineering and all that hardware tooling costs.”

Penske has some engineering now to do with the switch.

“We have to develop an engine program,” Penske said. “We have to develop a car. We're going to try to come together, hopefully (and Ford teams) will get the benefits of our expertise and also Roush's.”